In roughly 10 days, the Bill Counts October Game will begin, and I’ll begin drawing Shouting at the Void, my existential android hitman comic. The story is plotted out, I have half of the pages thumbnailed with dialogue scribbled out, most of the design work is done, and I’ve got a pretty good idea of how I want it to look. Here’s another test page I did this week:
I had oral surgery Friday. It was supposed to just be a biopsy on the cyst that had developed in my jaw, but once they’d gone in, they saw how big and infected it was and just went ahead and yanked it out rather than wait. Since then, my days have been spent largely in a painkiller haze, being unable to do much of anything outside of holding an ice pack on my face and watching dumb movies in bed. So I’ve had a lot of time on my hands lately to just sit and think, and I kept thinking about this comic, and one nagging little anxiety, a thing I’ve always dealt with before, managed to become more amplified alongside the spikes of pain in my jaw:
Who is the audience for this thing?
The October Game is kind of a local thing, and the majority of the people participating are painters and photographers, work that‘s kind of what one comes to expect in southern Appalachia. While my own work last year was all over the place, I was still kind of the only one doing weird sci-fi stuff most of the time. It didn’t really raise awareness of my work in the way I had kind of hoped it would. And this year I’m just taking it even further into obscurity, not just by doing a comic, but a comic about a city populated by androids, all colored in blues, with the plot revolving around a mysterious portal and a man with no face? Who the hell wants to read that, especially when it’s surrounded by landscape photos and charcoal portraits? I doubt I’ll be getting any new fans out of that Facebook space.
I’m feeling like I’ve already failed on some level before I’ve even begun drawing the comic, basically. This is a weird thing I’m doing, even by my own standards. My two big reference points for the book are Philip K. Dick and Seijun Suzuki, with maybe a dash of Welcome to Night Vale. As for visuals, hell, I don’t even know. Power Rangers and Kamen Rider, sure, Blade Runner, maybe some Kirby, and I’ve been looking a lot at Moritat’s art on Elephantmen and All Star Western, because he draws his pages just a little bit smaller than what I’m using for this. This is not an easy sell at all, and I’m not good at that sort of thing to begin with. Other Sleep has been online for over a year now and only really registers with maybe about a few dozen people tops? Most of whom are my friends. Shouting at the Void just doesn’t strike me as something anyone will really be all that into.
That’s kind of where the title of the comic comes from, actually. Any time I post my thoughts on the internet, write or draw something, and I get no response, I feel like I’m just shouting into this empty expanse. Fitting, isn’t it?
I don’t get much negative feedback on my art and comics. I mean, I don’t really get much of any kind of feedback at all, really. It’s kind of a good thing that I don’t have throngs of haters gnashing their teeth at me, because that shit isn’t cool. But, you know, our brains are wired to seek out and focus on anything remotely negative, so I mostly just feel like I’m being ignored, and Shouting at the Void isn’t really going to do anything to change that, is it?
One thing I do hear from time to time, that’s not necessarily negative criticism or whatever, but really does irk me…people tell me my art is weird all the time. And that’s cool, I like that, I’m into weird things and I like making weird things, good to know I’m succeeding at SOMETHING that I’m striving for. But occasionally I get someone who uses the word in a kind of derogatory manner. “Your weird-ass comics.” “Why are you so weird?” That kind of thing that I was so used to hearing in high school, “why do you like this weird shit?” Like, the fact that what I’m doing is different, not like other work, is offensive to these people. Taking one of the things about my art and about myself that I really enjoy and trying to use it against me? I hate that, that’s just…I don’t know.
I guess I’m just struggling here to come to terms with the fact that when I start putting everything I’ve got into drawing Shouting at the Void, into telling this bizarre little story that I’m proud of, that just like nearly everything else I do, it’s largely going to go unnoticed by the people that I’m trying to put it in front of.
But, you know, if you turn out to be one of those people who DOES read it, who even enjoys it, do me a little favor and spread the word, okay? I’m going to be posting it online EVERYWHERE, there will be no shortage of ways to find it. Just speak up, post a link on Facebook, Tweet it, let people know that you’re reading and enjoying this comic by this guy. Every little bit helps and it means a lot to me, too.
Okay, that’s enough bitching for now. Back to work.